--------------------------------------------------------- · · · · · · A E C F O R U M - "M E M E S I S" · · · · · · · · · · · · (http://www.aec.at/meme/symp/) · · · · · · --------------------------------------------------------- Dear memenoids Geert sent out a message suggesting we look at the cyborg and archive aspects of the memsis project. This is a little bit of a response to that. The question for an information-rich world concerns the processes of forgetting, how to forget, when to forget, what to forget. Forgetting is no longer accidental: we can all criticise Freud, but there is that one aspect of his work, the idea that everyday slips and forgettings are meaningful, that most of us will accept. Forgetting is as much the process of making meaning as is remembering, perhaps more so. The number of new synaptic connections in the brain of a newborn grows at an incredible rate, but these zillions of branching connections are soon pruned down to manageable proportions, presumably by the processes described in the Chinese proverb - where one person walks, there are only steps, but when many people pass along the same way, there you have a road. Forgetting is as much a part of the archival process as the catalogue -- one of Borges lessons rather obscured in Foucault's archeology. Forgetting is what makes it possible to turn the past into history. We lose a lot, but we gain imeasurably from turning the past into a zone of more-and-less-than-memory. It becomes a resource. The process of forgetting is built into human ontogeny, and it is there still in the processes of cyberniticisation which even Marx observed, looking at workers' craft skills being turned into the automatic memory of machines. That mechanical memory mechanically forgets its human antecedents. But if we are to build a cyborg culture (and I cannot see that we have the choice), we should be thinking not only of wehat kind of memory, but what kind of forgetting we should be designing. Forgetting too is an art, or can be, and it is a techne as much as memorizing, the technology of freedom *from* rather than freedom *to*. The meme thesis emphasises a kind of social (or in Dawkins case perhaps anti-social) memory. I just want to add a little counterbalance that suggests that what we forget is as much a part of who we are and what we can do as what we remember. Top paraphrase Stuart Brand, we are as people with Alzheimers, and we may as well get good at it. Sean Cubitt Reader in Video and Media Studies Liverpool John Moores University Dean Walters Building St James Road Liverpool L1 7BR UK 0151 231 5030 ---------------------------------------------------------- · · · · to subscribe to the Forum just mail to · · · · · · · memesis-request@aec.at (message text 'subscribe') · · · · · · · · · send messages to memesis@aec.at · · · · · · ----------------------------------------------------------
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